Anna Maria Schonleben was born in Nuremberg in 1760, orphaned at five, and married at nineteen to a notary named Zwanziger who drank himself to death and left her nothing. She was described by everyone who wrote about her as small, hunched, plain and desperate to be respected. She had two children, worked as a housekeeper, and by her forties was moving between posts in Bavaria looking for a widower to marry.
She took service in 1808 with a judge named Wolfgang Glaser at Pegnitz, who was separated from his wife. Zwanziger arranged a reconciliation, invited the wife to tea, and Frau Glaser died in agony that night. Glaser did not marry her and she moved on. German accounts of the period called her the German Brinvilliers, after the seventeenth-century French poisoner whose case is also in this archive.
She went to another judge, Grohmann, at Sanspareil, and when he showed no interest in marrying her he died too. She then worked for a magistrate named Gebhard, whose wife was pregnant. Frau Gebhard died shortly after giving birth. Zwanziger took over the running of the household and the care of the infant, and when the household began to suspect her she poisoned the servants and guests, and the baby, with arsenic in the food and in the salt cellar, in doses calculated to sicken rather than kill so that she could nurse them.
She was dismissed in September 1809, and Gebhard had the salt barrel analysed. It was full of arsenic. She was arrested in Nuremberg in October, and admitted everything at length, saying that she had wanted a husband and a place, and that arsenic had been her truest friend. Doctors examining her recorded that she trembled with pleasure when the poisonings were described to her.
The bodies were exhumed and arsenic found. She was convicted of three murders and several attempts and was beheaded with a sword at Nuremberg on July 17, 1811, aged fifty-one. Executions in Bavaria at that date were by sword, not guillotine, a point on which most popular accounts of her, including some in print, are wrong.